Monthly Archive for June, 2008

Printing horrors

Published on June 17, 2008 in AIR and flex. 7 Comments

Printing in a Flash/Flex application can be tricky to get right. I’ve been working on a very print-heavy application recently. We’ve been having a long standing intermittent bug where we print a large document, but some things on that document that were created through the Flash drawing API wouldn’t be on the paper.

We added a

var options:Object = canvas.prepareToPrint( canvas );

Before the print and a

canvas.finishPrint( options, canvas);

After the print, and it seems to have solved our problem even though the documentation says we shouldn’t ordinarily need to explicitly call those.

Xray Viewer updated

Published on June 16, 2008 in AIR, development, Flash, flex and XRay. Closed

The XRayViewer has been broken for quite some time. I had originally done it with an AIR beta, and that has since stopped working. So there’s now a newly compiled version just waiting for you to grab.

What is the XRayViewer?

So you may be asking yourself What exactly is the XRayViewer?

All this little app does is host the XRay connector and let you load a local swf. Then it displays the swf with some simple controls to play/stop/advance/back. The big benefit is you can then use XRay (By John Grden + Others) to inspect the swf without changing any code around.

There’s three new (very minor) features in this version:

There’s a button to launch the XRay interface in your default browser.
The path to the loaded swf is displayed in the top toolbar. (You can copy & paste that into Xray so you don’t have to navigate as far into the hierarchy)
New logo / icons

Now Open Source!

The entire project is now licensed under the MIT license. If you install the application and then right click on it you can “View Source” to get the source code for it.

AgileAgenda, Basecamp, and third party API’s

Published on June 14, 2008 in AgileAgenda. Closed

I haven’t blogged about AgileAgenda in a while on purpose since it seemed I was doing it far too often and was turning this blog into a big Ad instead of the resource for developers that I had meant it to be. But I’ve done good with only a single post in the past five months, and I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment with this one.

We just released a new version, and it has a feature that a lot of customers have been asking for. Far improved Basecamp integration! You can now connect to an SSL powered Basecamp install, and you can also now associate AgileAgenda resources with Basecamp contacts to automatically assign the Todo items. This is a huge jump in the integration between these two products and I’m really excited about it. We also streamlined some of the synchronization so it all happens a bit faster. You can read all about it here.

In the future, I’ll be exploring other services to integrate with. At my day-job we’re beginning a QualityCenter rollout, so that may be on the list. Along with that, I’ve always had plans to be able to export to Google Calendar. Working with third party API’s really excites me since it’s a way to add a huge chunk of functionality (and customer value) very easily. Any other ideas?

That really gets me thinking about interchangeable data on the web and how good it is for end users. With that in mind, I hope to be able to release the AgileAgenda integration API sometime this summer that would allow other applications to integrate with AgileAgenda. That’s going to take some serverside rework, but that’ll need to happen eventually for other reasons. Before that, we’ll start publishing RSS feeds of schedules so external programs can at least start consuming data from AgileAgenda.

Creating a simple diagramming application

Published on June 9, 2008 in actionscript 3, flex, ObjectHandles and OpenSource. 4 Comments

Tonight, I’ll be giving a short talk to BFAIG on using ObjectHandles and Degrafa to make a simple diagramming application. This application demonstrates the basics of working with Degrafa, and also shows how easy it is to make an interface that allows users to resize and move objects on screen.

The example application has source attached, and is licensed under the MIT license. I hope someone can take it and make some really great application out of it. Please drop me an email if you do!

I recorded a practice-run I did, so here it is…

Run the application (Flex application with view-source enabled)
Creating a simple diagramming application (14 Minute Video)

Gonna try out this CFML stuff, where to start?

Published on June 6, 2008 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

I’ve heard great things about Cold Fusion, and with the second CFML server being open sourced just recently, it’s probably time for me to dip my feet in.

So first, here’s what I want out of this…

I want a development environment which I can very quickly develop web based applications with. I need something that lets me do the most common web things very quickly. I’m not afraid of writing Java for complex stuff. (but really, how often does a web app have to do something really complex?)

Now, some questions that perhaps any readers out there might be able to help with…

Can you suggest where a CFML newbie should look to get started? I ordered the first two volumes of ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit to get started already. What blogs / websites / etc. should I visit regularly?

If I’m gonna go with an Open Source solution to start, OpenBD, or Railo? In case it matters, eventually I’ll need it to run within JBoss and serve through Apache via an AJP connection back to JBoss.

What dev-environment do most people (on OSX) use for CFML? Dreamweaver? TextMate? cfeclipse? Since I’m also doing Flex stuff, the Eclipse based solution sounds appealing.

ObjectHandles Spotted – KwikUML

Published on June 5, 2008 in Uncategorized. Closed

I was trying out KwikUML today and noticed some familiar looking resize handles.

A quick look inside the OSX bundle confirmed it, a use of ObjectHandles. This psyched me up, it was the first time I "accidently" found a use of one of my projects while doing my normal daily stuff. Looks like an older version since I noticed a couple bugs that have since been fixed, and there’s some custom behavior added in.